ECRI Institute PSO launches health IT safety partnership

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ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization (PSO) has launched the first multi-stakeholder partnership to generate new knowledge on safe health IT practices.

The Partnership for Promoting Health IT Patient Safety creates a national framework to proactively identify health IT safety issues within a non-punitive learning environment to improve health IT patient safety. It is the first program of its kind to provide collaboration among health IT vendors, providers, professional societies, PSOs, policymakers, and others toward achieving health IT-enabled patient safety.

“The innovation comes in because we've invited vendors to participate in this collaborative, so it won't just be a patient safety organization, or a clinician, or an expert looking at these events in a vacuum,” said Ronni Solomon, executive vice president and general counsel, ECRI Institute. “And we're all going to be looking at what's happening, why it's happening, and what we can do to prevent it.”

Through collaboration, the partnership aims to tap into pooled expertise to study health IT-related events and hazards, identify promising solutions and best practices, and engage stakeholders in sharing the lessons learned.

“We will now be able to analyze similar issues but through different lenses and better identify the breaks in the process that may only be apparent to one stakeholder,” said Dr Karen Zimmer, medical director, ECRI Institute PSO.

“For example, a system may work well in stage and even when implemented, but if a provider creates a work-around, there may be unintended consequences. We are hoping to enhance the learnings and then together come up with solutions that would address these issues,” she added.